India Pops Into U.S. Culture

[Guest guest]

Okay, did you know that the Rolling Stones' famous "tongue logo" was

spawned from Mick Jagger's fascination with images of Kali Maa?

 

That and many more fascinating tidbits appear in this wonderful

update on Indian cultures continuing inroads into the U.S.'s

cultural landscape, from Saturday's Arts section in the Washington

Times:

 

INDIA POPS INTO U.S. CULTURE

By Scott Galupo

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

 

August 2, 2003 - It wasn't too long ago that Aroon Shivdasani would

hear an irritated complaint from her now 22-year old daughter: "Mom,

not your Indian music again."

 

Of late, says Miss Shivdasani, her daughter is sampling CDs from

artists such as the Coventry, England-based Panjabi MC and the

London-born DJ Rekha.

 

Both are DJs who have helped create a new vogue in pop music: a

fusion of traditional bhangra rhythms from India's Punjab region and

Western hip-hop.

 

"Now I hear, 'Mom, have you heard this?'" says Miss Shivdasani,

executive director of the Indo-American Arts Council in New York

City. "It's part of her culture."

 

That would be American pop culture, an arena in which Indian

influence has expanded considerably in the last few years, if not

through actual Indian-born musicians and filmmakers then through the

vast global Indian diaspora, big chunks of which are found in the

United Kingdom and in America.

 

In England, the old British colonial presence on the Indian

subcontinent has long produced fruitful Anglo-Indian connections,

especially in literary fiction, with contemporary novelists such as

Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, an ethnic Indian from Trinidad.

 

Earlier than that, the imperial link produced works such as E.M.

Forster's "A Passage to India" and Rudyard Kipling's "Kim"

and "Jungle Book" (still a popular Disney movie franchise).

 

Here in America, however, Indian cultural inroads are more recent.

According to U.S. Census figures, the Asian-Indian population more

than doubled from 800,000 in 1990 to 1.7 million in 2000, with many

finding work in the professional class and the high-tech industry.

 

Miss Shivdasani, whose organization supports Indian artists working

in North America, says the artistic segment of America's Indian

immigrants has blossomed in the last five years and is

now "exploding."

 

Sometimes, the Indian diaspora's offspring have deceptively European

surnames like Jones — as in Norah Jones, the Grammy-winning pop-jazz

sensation and daughter of the popular Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar.

 

Miss Jones, by all indications, is far more interested in

traditional American music — from Hank Williams to Hoagy Carmichael —

than in anything emanating from Punjab.

 

But there are diaspora artists whose work is overtly Indian, like

director Mira Nair's "Monsoon Wedding," a crossover, English-

language comedy about an arranged marriage in India.

 

Another director of Indian heritage, Gurinder Chadha, helmed one of

the spring's most surprising hits, "Bend It Like Beckham," the story

of an English-born Indian teenager jousting with traditionalist Sikh

parents over her love of soccer.

 

Despite a limited release, "Beckham" has grossed $26.3 million in

the United States — a robust performance for a low-budget British

movie without marquee actors about an activity, soccer, that's never

quite caught on here.

 

And it's still going strong: Yesterday, Fox Searchlight

expanded "Beckham" nationwide to a total of 1,200 screens.

 

The most successful Indian-born director on either side of the

Atlantic, though, is M. Night Shyamalan.

 

Raised near Philadelphia, Mr. Shyamalan has generated a string of

box-office hits with better-than-average critical notices,

including "Stuart Little" (for which he wrote the screenplay), the

$294 million-grossing "The Sixth Sense" and last year's "Signs,"

which netted Mel Gibson the biggest box-office opening of his career

so far.

 

It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that Indians have

flourished in the American movie industry; the doors were kicked

open decades ago, well before the '90s-era spike in Indian

immigration to the United States.

 

Ismail Merchant, for instance, the Bombay-born half of the legendary

Merchant-Ivory production team, has been in business in Hollywood

since the mid-'60s, yielding, along with partner James Ivory, movies

such as "Howard's End,The Remains of the Day" and several other

critically acclaimed literary adaptations. (Next week, their latest

project, "Le Divorce," based on Diane Johnson's novel, hits area

theaters.)

 

Mr. Merchant is "the granddaddy of the diaspora," Miss Shivdasani

remarks. While India has long had its own pop entertainment

industry — dubbed Bollywood — "he was the first Indian to make films

outside India that people paid attention to."

 

What's been more surprising, perhaps, is the Indian penetration into

pop music.

 

There are young Indian musicians such as Sunny Jain and Ravish

Momin, both percussionists based in New York, who have blended

classical Indian music with all manner of African and Asian rhythms.

Vijay Iyer, meanwhile, has infused jazz piano with a similar

sensibility.

 

But this is the stuff of world music esoterica.

 

Improbably, perhaps, it has been hip-hop artists like Jay-Z and

Missy Elliot who have embraced the sounds of the subcontinent,

plucking it from obscure underground clubs (such as one in New York,

run by DJ Rekha) and European discotheques.

 

Panjabi MC owes much of his stateside fame to Jay-Z, who

collaborated with the British DJ on "Mundian To Bach Ke" (Punjabi

for "Beware of the Boys"). From Panjabi's recently released

CD "Beware," the cut was remixed, with partly English lyrics, by the

American rapper.

 

The bhangra-hip-hop melange may be the most notable Western pop

foray into the subcontinent since the late '60s and the Beatles-

inspired incorporation of the sitar and raga-style sounds, as well

as the hippie generation's fascination with the easygoing

spirituality of the ashram.

 

But in that era it was more a case of the West "pushing" outward

rather than "pulling" inward, to borrow the formulation of political

scientist Samuel Huntington.

 

An enduring, if narrowly realized, symbol of the one-way pollination

is the Rolling Stones' famous logo, the lascivious red mouth and

tongue.

 

Mick Jagger commissioned designer John Pasch to Westernize a

striking image he frequently noticed on calendars in the Indian and

Pakistani shops of London: the disembodied tongue of the Hindu

goddess Kali.

 

The image was co-opted, and few people realize its provenance.

 

Not so with today's South Asian invasion — an invasion from both

within and without.

 

"It's a natural evolution," says Miss Shivdasani, "as Indians go out

and do different things in different milieus. For the last decade,

people have been trying to build an awareness of who they are

outside of India.

 

"They don't remain in their little ghettos," she continues. "It's so

exciting, because this is what art is all about — whether it's food,

dance or music. Here's another sound. Here's another flavor.

 

"Look at how salsa came on," Miss Shivdasani points out, referring

to the now ubiquitous, but once exclusively Latin, rhythm.

 

Indians have a long way to go before their numbers compete with

American Hispanics, who are now the country's largest ethnic

minority population.

 

But given their relatively small slice of the populace, they've

proved influential beyond their numbers.

 

 

Source: http://washingtontimes.com/arts/20030801-093833-7329r.htm

2003 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.